IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn has called for a new body to save taxpayers the cost of bank failure. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

The International Monetary Fund has proposed two new global levies on banks to be considered at the weekend's meeting of the G20 finance ministers. The first, the "financial stability contribution", is a flat levy to be paid by all banks to generate a self-insurance fund equivalent to 4-5% of each country's GDP, totalling around $1-2tn. It's about the same amount that taxpayers have shelled out to bail out banks in this financial crisis. The second levy, called the "financial activities tax", or FAT, is on the profits and remuneration of banks and this money can be paid into general revenue, meaning that it is not geared for insurance but to deter risk-taking behaviour where banks trade on the implicit guarantee that they are too important to fail, and take home large pay packets while taxpayers pick up their losses.

The first levy on bank balance sheets is essentially what President Obama had proposed in January to recoup taxpayers' money; and the second is what the Labour government had imposed (but as a one-off, windfall tax), which is based on a similar principle, but also in theory would try to change the bonus culture.

A perennial complaint about the self-insurance scheme is that it makes banks more complacent because they know that they will be bailed out. If, however, this crisis has made it clear that there is already an implicit guarantee in place, then making it explicit and forcing them to pay for it hardly seems objectionable. The IMF also recommends that resolution regimes, or "living wills", be mandated alongside this scheme to try to address some of this moral hazard so that taxpayers will not be forced to bail out banks if they can fail without causing systemic collapse.

The part of the levy that is more tentative is the proposal that the flat levy becomes linked to the systemic risk posed by a bank over time. The "too big to fail" problem has also hamstrung the Financial Stability Board, which had proposed similar levies to address this issue for the G20, but hadn't entirely dealt with the problem of systematically important banks. The banks may protest, but a levy may be the best of the options out there. The other proposals would cut them down in size by breaking them up into retail and investment banks, as proposed by the Lib Dems. The US "Volcker rule" would ban banks from proprietary trading, so it's also virtually a reversion to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. So, before they protest too much, paying a graduated balance sheet levy and creating a "living will" are hardly the most radical options out there.

The second levy, though, may end up generating revenue rather than deter excessive risk-taking behaviour. This is the case with the UK bonus tax that, while expected to raise £500m, has instead generated £2bn, which means that banks are not paying less in bonuses. In fact, they seem willing to pay more tax even though the levy was designed to be paid by the institution, instead of individuals, for the purpose of changing the bonus culture.

The proposed IMF levy is on both profit and remuneration, so it goes beyond the bonus tax and is linked directly to the wage bill of banks. Banks that make a lot of money and pay high wages and bonuses will pay a higher levy. If, though, taxpayers must pick up the bill if their losses exceed that of the new self-insurance fund, then surely a "claw-back" provision to make bankers return pay for deals that have gone bad later would be better suited to deter excessive risk-taking.

The part of the report that will sound sweet to the ears of politicians of all parties is where the IMF has recommended that this be done on a global basis to prevent regulatory arbitrage. Despite the popular contempt for banks much bandied about during the election campaign, no party wants to risk jeopardising London's position as a global financial centre. Financial services constitute about 8% of GDP and generates at least twice that much in corporate tax revenues (possibly up to a quarter of the total).

The Tories, in particular, will breathe a sigh of relief since they were wrong-footed when they said that they would act unilaterally, and then retracted when attacked by Labour to claim instead that they were simply moving with the emerging global consensus. Now it looks as if they are in tune with international opinion, though not all countries (namely Japan and Canada) are in favour of this fundamental change in the global financial regulatory regime.

With the US, Britain and even the normally conservative IMF going down this road, it looks as though the question will be when, and not if, financial regulatory reform will happen – to the relief of many who thought that the political consensus behind it had fallen by the wayside.